CNTRL/ALT/DELETE
Favorite Psalms Part 24
Psalm 139:23-24     10-6-2013
Summary: We must pray for God to search our hearts because sin is so harmful and because it is hidden and hard to detect (especially when there is righteous anger). We hate sin and love righteousness, so we ask God to expose our sin so we can do away with our sinful way and take God’s hand as He leads us into the everlasting way. God answers this prayer through the Scriptures (especially the law), and the counsel of godly people will help you hear that answer. When you discover your sin, confess it and ask forgiveness. 
Introduction - Join God in Reality
Why Pray for This?
1)	The Harm of Sin
2)	The Hiddenness of Sin
Inner Man
Attitudes
Continual Creation of New Sins
Sin Has a Blinding Effect
The Lies of the Enemy
Especially During Righteous Anger
3)	The Hope of Righteousness
My Way Or The HIGH Way
Still A Distinction Between The Sinful Righteous And The Sinful Wicked
Desire to Be Examined
Requesting Trials
Come As You Are; Stay To Change
How to Hear God’s Answer
Through the Scriptures
Be Specific
Listen to Counsel
Conclusion
James 1:25 Questions
Appendix: Practical Theology

Psalm 139:1 O Lord, you have searched me and you know me. 2 You know when I sit and when I rise; you perceive my thoughts from afar. 3 You discern my going out and my lying down; you are familiar with all my ways. 4 Before a word is on my tongue you know it completely, O Lord. 5 You hem me in--behind and before; you have laid your hand upon me. 6 Such knowledge is too wonderful for me, too lofty for me to attain. 7 Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence? 8 If I go up to the heavens, you are there; if I make my bed in the depths, behold, you! 9 If I rise on the wings of the dawn, if I settle on the far side of the sea, 10 even there your hand will guide me, your right hand will hold me fast. 11 If I say, "Surely the darkness will hide me and the light become night around me," 12 even the darkness will not be dark to you; the night will shine like the day, for darkness is as light to you. 13 For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother's womb. 14 I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well. 15 My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place. When I was woven together in the depths of the earth, 16 your eyes saw my unformed body. All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be. 17 How precious to me are your thoughts, O God! How vast is the sum of them! 18 Were I to count them, they would outnumber the grains of sand. When I awake, I am still with you. 19 If only you would slay the wicked, O God! Away from me, you bloodthirsty men! 20 They speak of you with evil intent; your adversaries misuse your name. 21 Do I not hate those who hate you, O Lord, and abhor those who rise up against you? 22 I have nothing but hatred for them; I count them my enemies. 23 Search me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts. 24 See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.

Introduction - Join God in Reality
The only thoughts God has about you are true ones. And so if you want to be near to God - if you want to draw close to Him, and walk with Him, and have close fellowship with Him, you have to join Him in His way of thinking. And His way of thinking deals only in reality, which means we cannot be near Him or have fellowship with Him if we are living in a fantasy world. If I am believing things about myself that are not true, then I am living in a world that is not the same world as God is living in. And God will not join me in my fantasy world. If I want to be close to Him I am going to have to let go of the fantasy and join Him in reality. If I want to walk with God, I will have to wake up from whatever dream world I am in and come back to reality. 
The problem comes when I don’t know the truth about myself.
Jeremiah 17:9 The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it?
1 Corinthians 4:4 My conscience is clear, but that does not make me innocent. It is the Lord who judges me.
Proverbs 21:2 All a man's ways seem right to him, but the Lord weighs the heart.
Proverbs 28:26 He who trusts his own heart is a fool.
David was a man who had pretty good insight into the condition of his own heart - probably better than most. And yet even he had to cry out to God for help in discovering what was really in there. The last four weeks we have been studying Psalm 139, and we come this morning to the final two verses:
Psalm 139:23 Search me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts. 24 See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.
Why Pray for This?
If you go back to verse 1 you will see the very first line in this psalm is this:
1 O Lord, you have searched me and you have known me.
And now at the end of the psalm, David asks God to search and know him. If God is already doing it, why ask Him to do it? The answer is David is asking for something different in verse 23 than what God is doing in verse 1. Back in verse 1 the purpose was to show how much interest God takes in David’s life. That is a wonderful, comforting truth. But now David is asking for something else. The purpose of the searching David is requesting in verse 23 is so that the hidden sin in David’s heart can be revealed to David. He is saying, “God, search me and tell me the results.” I get that from verse 24.
24 See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.
David wants to correct what is wrong. If God searched David’s heart and found sin but never exposed it or revealed it to David, then nothing has happened (since God knew about the sin to begin with). If you went to your doctor for your annual physical and he ran tests and looked at the results and said, “Hmmm .... Wow! Oh, my goodness ... Good night! ... Oh boy...” And then he turned to you and said, “Ok, see you next year” and walked out - what good would that be? In these last two verses of the psalm David is asking to see the test results. So the verse 1 searching was for David’s comfort; this searching is for David’s information.
Why? Isn’t that kind of morbid - to want to discover more information about what is wrong with you? Why pray a prayer like this? Three reasons.
1)	The Harm of Sin
First, we need our sin exposed because it is like a disease. Left untreated, it will do us harm. All sin causes harm - including unknown sin. If you commit a sin in ignorance, you may not bear as much culpability as if you knew what you were doing, but there is still damage done. All sin does harm. If it didn't, then there would be no reason for David to pray this. Why ask God to expose what is hidden if the fact that it is hidden makes it harmless? David knew that sin is like a disease, and if you catch it in the early stages it is much easier to kill. But the longer it remains undetected, the more damage it does.
And that is easy enough to observe. Suppose I am extremely rude in my mannerisms and the way I talk to people, but I don’t realize it. I am sarcastic with people, and it really hurts them, but I am oblivious to the harm I am doing. I tell lies and steal things, but I don’t think it’s wrong, because I have always been told that it’s ok to lie as long as it is nothing big. I use foul language, but I think it’s fine because I have never read Ephesians 5. Obviously all those things are doing harm - even though I might be acting in ignorance.
Those things not only do harm to the people around me, they do harm to my own soul. In many cases, we act in ignorance, but the ignorance is actually caused by the sin. A lot of our ignorance is willful ignorance. I don’t know that this thing is sin, or I don’t realize that I have that sin in me, because I don’t want to know. I have blinded my eyes to it. Or I have neglected to learn the things that I could have learned from God’s Word. It is not unusual for people to be rebuked in Scripture for their ignorance, because their ignorance was their own fault. They did not know the truth because deep down they were unwilling to accept the truth.
So even our unknown sins cause harm - harm to ourselves, harm to others, and, most of all, harm to the reputation of God. Last week we studied in verses 19-22 all about how outraged we should be at the wicked because they dishonor God’s name. And if I am outraged when they dishonor God’s name because of how much I love God, I will be even more outraged when I dishonor God’s name. Isn’t it true that my sin dishonors God even more than the sins of unbelievers? It is one thing for the king’s enemies to go to war against him. But when the king’s own children take up arms against him, that is the most egregious dishonor. The secret, unknown sins in my heart are doing violence to the majesty of God, and that is an intolerable situation. It must stop!
2)	The Hiddenness of Sin
So why pray this prayer? First, because of the harm of sin, and second, because of the hiddenness of sin. I have got something inside me that is doing harm, and it is something I cannot spot on my own. If you think you can easily just do a quick inventory and figure out the extent of your sin problem in your heart, think again. A lot of our sin is hard to detect - especially the internal things that cause the external actions. 
Inner Man
Notice that David does not even ask God to examine his actions or words. He says, “Search my heart and my thoughts.” David understood that sinful actions are just symptoms. Trying to deal with a sin problem at the level of your actions is like trying to cure a sinus infection by wiping your nose with a Kleenex. It is useless to just say, “I’ve got to stop doing this sinful action.” You have to go inside, beneath the symptoms, and get to the disease itself, which is always in the heart. All sin originates in the heart. Not 80%, not 99.9% - every sin originates in the heart.
Matthew 15:19 For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false testimony, slander.
The sin problem is deep down inside. That is why David has to pray and ask God to expose it, because it is not something that is observable by the human eye. Kind of like the software in a computer. The longer you own a computer, inevitably, over time, it will start to bog down. It gets slower and slower. And if it gets too bad we will run some kind of scan or try to discover what program or process is slowing things down. But you can’t see the problem. All we know is this machine just is not working like it used to. Our souls are like that. We pick up these hidden sins, and they run in the background and create all kinds of problems. Our desire for Scripture just is not what it used to be. Our love for the saints is ... patchy. Our ability to trust God in some area just seems to be freezing up. We try to put into practice the things we learn here at church and we just keep getting the little hourglass on the screen. By praying this prayer in verses 23-24, David is hitting ctrl-alt-delete, so he can see which processes are causing the problem and hit “end process.”
Attitudes
One of the most difficult sins to detect in your own heart is sins of attitude. When you have some sin that just defeats you over and over again and you cannot seem to get any victory in that area, in many cases the reason you cannot get lasting victory is because even though you claim to believe that this is sinful, in your attitudes it does not really seem sinful to you. When your soul really is not convinced that something is evil, then at the moment of temptation you will tend to cave in because the rationalizations sound plausible. So we need God to search us to reveal wrong attitudes, wrong perspectives, wrong desires - all kinds of hard-to-detect diseases. 
Continual Creation of New Sins
And not only are these kinds of sins hard to detect, but once you do finally detect it and hit “end process” and get that sin out of your life, new ones are constantly popping up. So David says, “God, You have searched me; search me again. Never stop. Until the day I die, keep searching me with unrelenting, never-ending scrutiny.” Why? Because my flesh never stops creating new rebellions and modes of disobedience. My heart is an idol factory, my flesh never runs out of new ideas for ways to sin, and so what I need is not a yearly checkup. What I need is more like an antivirus program that runs 24/7.
Sin Has a Blinding Effect
I need help in discovering my own sin because it is hidden in my inner man, and because there is new sin arising all the time, and thirdly because sin itself has a darkening effect on the mind, so the more you indulge in it, the more blinded and confused you become. The longer a person lives in some sin, the more it starts to feel like he needs that sin in order to be happy. And once your soul thinks it has to have something in order to be happy, your soul will jimmy the facts around so that when your mind thinks it over, you come to the conclusion that it’s ok. Admitting the truth about my sin will mean I have to give it up, and I don’t want to do that, so my mind just takes a detour every time it starts to approach any evidence that what I am doing is wrong.
And not only does sin have a darkening effect, it also has a hardening effect. It makes your heart more stubborn and less willing to change.
Hebrews 3:13 But encourage one another daily, as long as it is called Today, so that none of you may be hardened by sin's deceitfulness.
The deceitfulness of sin can harden your heart.
The Lies of the Enemy
Add to all that the fact that the culture we live in is eager to help us justify our sin. And so they are constantly coming up with new names for sins that do not sound sinful. So the new word for grumbling and complaining is “venting.” That way it doesn’t sound sinful. Who could be faulted for just letting off exhaust? The new word for lacking self-control is “compulsive.” That sounds morally neutral. What shame is there in being compelled? Sins of worry and fretting are renamed as being “stressed.” If too much weight is placed on a bridge and it becomes stressed, that’s not the bridge’s fault. Cowardice becomes “insecurity,” discontent becomes “coping,” enslaving oneself to a sin becomes “addiction.” Instead of fornicating, people “live together.” What could be better than things like living and togetherness? 
Satan is the master deceiver, and he is constantly working to deceive us into thinking our sin is not really sin. And one of his primary tools is the culture around us. They are experts at making sin sound non-sinful.
Especially During Righteous Anger
It is so easy for us to fall into self-deception about our sin. And that is never more true than in times when we are in conflict with wicked people. (Remember the context of vv.19-22 where David talks about how much he hates the enemies of God.) If I get angry because someone has hurt me (or is hurting me), that is always sinful, selfish anger. It does not matter how extreme their offense is - small or big, if I am angry because they are hurting me, that is always sinful anger. The only time my anger is righteous anger is when I am angry only because someone is dishonoring God - like David in verses 19-22. But even then - even when it is a righteous zeal for God’s name, it can still very easily push me into sin.
For example, suppose I turn on the radio and hear some false teacher leading people astray with a false gospel. And I think about all the damage that person is doing to people’s souls, slamming the door of heaven in their faces, and I become angry. Is that righteous anger? Yes. But then, say at that moment Tracy walks into the room, and I am short and harsh with her in the way I talk, because of the mood I am in now. Is that righteous? No, that is sin. Just that fast righteous anger can push me into sin. Or maybe in my anger toward that false teacher, I start to look down my nose at him from a position of superiority - like I am better than him. Now my righteous anger has turned to sinful pride and arrogance.
James 1:20 man's anger does not bring about the righteous life that God desires. 
I believe that holds true even for righteous anger. There is a place for righteous anger. We saw that last week - we must have zeal for God’s name, and we must vigorously oppose evil from the very core of our being. And our emotions should be involved when we oppose evil. But in those times we need to really be on the alert, because it is so easy for the enemy to shove us into sin when we are angry.
And so it makes perfect sense that immediately after verses 19-22, David turns and asks God to search his heart for sin -  right after praying for God to punish the wicked in verses 19-22. Everything David said in those verses is good, and holy and righteous. However, David knows he is in dangerous territory.
Any time you have any feelings of hostility in your heart toward a person, that is a good time to pray Ps.139:23 - search me O God, and know my heart, test me and know my anxious thoughts. It is when your thoughts are anxious and agitated and worked up that you especially need to pray this because anxiety-ridden thoughts are always a hotbed for breeding sin. 
“God, my zeal for Your name is making me upset at these people who ignore Your Word, I’m irritated at them, I’m frustrated, so God search my heart and show me which parts are sinful, selfish anger and which are righteous indignation.” 
The righteous anger and the selfish anger can sometimes blend together with such undetectable mingling that the sin is undetectable without a special work of grace. 
3)	The Hope of Righteousness
So why does David pray a prayer like this? Because sin is hidden and hard to detect, and because hidden sin is so harmful. That is two reasons, but there is one more reason - the best reason of all. David asks God to reveal if there is any wicked way in him so that David can not only abandon that wicked way, but to be led instead on the everlasting way.
24 See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.
There are two ways - the offensive one and the everlasting one. The word way refers to the path you take through life. To put it in the vernacular, it is the way you roll. You cannot get on that everlasting way to roll as long as you are rolling on some other way, so the greatest reason of all for trying to discover the sin in your heart is so you can be led in the direction of that everlasting way.
When you get caught up in some sin, it is hard to find your way out. It is like that neighborhood just on the opposite side of Holly from the Montoya’s neighborhood. If you ever have the misfortune of turning into that neighborhood, you had better have a full tank of gas because it is almost impossible to find your way out of there. Every street you turn on just leads to a dead end or to some other street you have already been on. And the whole neighborhood is one giant, tangled mass of twisted ways leading nowhere, and there is only one way out. That neighborhood is a great example of what sin is like. When you get into sin, every way you take that looks promising ends up being a dead end. There is only one through street - one way that actually goes somewhere good, and it is not a way you will be able to find on your own. You have to be led there. David does not say, “Let me discover the everlasting way.” He does not ask for a map, or a GPS. He asks God to personally take him by the hand and lead him.
My Way Or The HIGH Way
Why? Why do I have to be led in that way? Why can’t I just discover it? Because of the crookedness of my heart. You see, the offensive way is not just a certain path through life. The evil, offensive way is something that lies not in life but inside me.
24 ... see if there is any offensive way in me. 
The sinful, offensive, wrong way - the reason that is the way I roll is because it is something intrinsic to me. It does not just lure my heart – it is a part of what I am.
But the everlasting way is not naturally within me. To take that way I need a Guide to take my hand and lead me along – pulling me from the way that is inside me to a better way. And so we ask God to lead us out of our sin into that everlasting way, because that way is so good. It is the only way to true joy, and so it is worth any sacrifice to get on that road. If that road leads through a place of pain and sorrow and suffering and peril and grief and sickness and death, it is still worth it. Oh, that enough faith would well up in our hearts that we would believe this way to be better than our own way! It is better because it is the only path into God’s presence. 
No way is taken by itself. For a way to be taken there must either be an internal bent toward that way, or an external leading in that way. Our natural bent is just like David’s - it tends to move in the way of destruction. And so like David we cry out to God and ask Him to lead us in the only path in life that is not a dead end.
Still A Distinction Between The Sinful Righteous And The Sinful Wicked
Is this a morbid prayer? Not in the slightest! David is praying for something of exceeding value. It would have been morbid if David had asked for what he deserved. If he said, “Search me O God, and expose every wicked, offensive way in me, and then slap me across the mouth for that sin!” - that would be morbid. But instead of asking for what he deserves, David asks for grace. 
“God, once you find all this sin in me, overlook it, forgive it, and instead of punishing me for it, just ... give me the greatest gift there is.”
That sounds like an outrageous prayer, but it is actually exactly the prayer God wants us to pray. God is fine with us asking for that, because that is right in line with what is in His heart. When God searches His children and tests our hearts for sin, it is not so that He can condemn us and punish us. He searches us to expose what is destroying us so it can be dealt with. So this seemingly outrageous prayer is something we are allowed to ask of God, because of His unbounded mercy toward His children.
Think about it - what did David just get done doing in the previous paragraph? He asked God to kill the wicked.
“Punish them, because they deserve to die for their sin.”
But if God searches David and finds sin, doesn’t that mean David also deserves to die? Wouldn’t he also be among the wicked? If those people are called wicked because of their sin, and David also has sin in his heart, isn’t he just like them? No, not at all. David was not among the wicked. Yes, he did sin, but his attitude toward his sin was the opposite of the attitude of the wicked. The difference between a child of God and an enemy of God is faith. When you truly trust God, that changes your attitude toward sin. Unbelievers love their sin and want to keep it hidden so they don’t have to give it up. But David hated his sin and wanted it exposed so he could get rid of it. The difference between the wicked and the righteous is not that they sin and we do not. It is that they love their sin and cling to it, and we hate our sin and repent of it.
Desire to Be Examined
One of the ways you can tell you are truly saved is the desire to be examined by God and to have your sin exposed. That is a mark of a genuinely saved person. Sometimes people will come up to me and say, “Darrell, that sermon grinded me to powder,” and they mean it as a compliment. That is their way of saying, “Nice sermon.” 
“Great sermon, pastor - I feel like I have two black eyes and a bloody nose.”
Why is that a compliment? Are we masochists? We want a convicting sermon because we just love pain? No. We want a convicting sermon because we hate our sin so much that we would gladly go under the knife of the great Surgeon if that is what it takes to get rid of it. We are thrilled when a sermon is convicting because it gives us the ability to take that next step toward greater righteousness. 
Requesting Trials
But if you do not have that deep, compelling desire to be more holy and righteous and pure, that is a good reason to question whether you are genuinely saved. The desire for righteousness in the heart of a true child of God is so extreme and driving that we are willing to suffer, if need be, to get it. Have you ever thought about what David is asking here when he says try (test) me and know my thoughts? What is the primary way that our faith is tested? Suffering. The furnace that puts our hearts to the test is the fire of suffering. It is when we experience pain and loss that sinful motives and attitudes tend to be exposed. David is so intent on wanting to discover the hidden sin in his life, he goes so far as to ask God for trials. We test ourselves in the fires of our own self-examination and find some things to be pure gold, but they need to go through the hotter oven of God’s scrutiny to verify that, or to burn off the hidden dross.
Have you ever gotten to the point of being so defeated and discouraged by a sin in your life that you just cry out to God and say, "God, take this away! Whatever it takes - any suffering, any loss, any disaster, if that is what it takes, get this out of my life, do it!"? David is taking that prayer a step further. He is saying that about sin he is not even aware of.
"God, reveal my unknown sin. Send me through the furnace. Even if it means my heart will have to be racked with pain and I will suffer loss or something will happen that will cause me sorrow the whole rest of my life. Whatever it takes, expose what is in there that needs to be exposed."
That is a fearful thing to ask for. This is not something we do lightly. When we sing that little chorus, "Search me, O God," and we get to the line that says "Try me and know my thoughts," that is not something to sing lightly. Realize what you are asking for. Do not ask God to try you and test you and then freak out a week later when He answers that prayer. It is a scary thing to pray, but we pray it anyway because of how much we hate our sin and we desire holiness in our lives.
Come As You Are; Stay To Change
And if all this strikes you as extreme - kind of a shock to your system, it may be that you have been influenced by a generation of preachers who keep saying, "God loves you just the way you are," or that song, "Come, just as you are to worship." We have a generation of "Come as you are" churches.
Does Jesus love you just the way you are? Yes, but He does not always love the fact that you are that way. He loves you just the way you are, but He also loves you too much to leave you the way you are. I don’t want to disparage everyone who uses that slogan. Some churches, when they say, “Come as you are,” all they mean by that is that you don’t have to clean up your act before coming to God. And that is right on. You do not have to clean up your life before coming to God. However, if you are not coming to God in order to have Him clean up your life, then you are not really coming to God. And we do not ever come just as we are to worship. We repent of our sins and prepare our hearts before approaching the presence of God in worship.
It would be fine if a church had a slogan that said something like, "Come as you are, stay to be changed." But all too often the implied message is, "Come as you are and stay as you are. Jesus loves you just the way you are, no need to make any changes." That is the kind of church a lot of people are looking for - a church that will affirm that you are just fine with God even if you do not change anything in your life. And we have been bombarded with that message from so many for so long that it might be a jolt to the system to discover that the heart of a true follower of Christ is one that so hates his own sin that he would pray this, "Try me, God. Send me through the fire to expose my sin so I can get it out of my life."
How to Hear God’s Answer
So the reason we pray this prayer is because our sin is damaging, it is deadly, we hate it, we want to be rid of it at all costs, but it is hidden deep down inside us. So we need God’s help to expose it so we can forsake it and be led by God into the everlasting way. That is why we pray this prayer. But then how will God answer this prayer? If I ask God to reveal to me what sin is in my heart, how will He tell me? Is He going to send me an email, or will it just suddenly pop into my head? How will God answer this prayer? How will God bring us to the point of being conscious of our hidden sins?
Through the Scriptures 
Romans 3:20 through the law we become conscious of sin.
God will tell us the test results the same way He always speaks to us - through His Word. If you want to be able to discover hidden sin in your heart, you need to strive to gain a deeper and deeper understanding of the commands in God’s Word. The Bible teaches us what righteousness is and what sin is. And the less acquainted you are with what the Bible teaches, the more easily you will be deceived. So we need a thorough understanding of the law of God.
And that kind of understanding requires more than just academic knowledge. It requires not just information, but also application. We have to put what we learn into practice. Some people, when they listen to a sermon, the whole time they are thinking about all the various people who really need to hear this message. And they never seem to be in the list. They have all kinds of ideas about what is wrong with everyone else, but not about their own hearts. Most of us are much better at spotting a little speck in someone else’s eye than we are at seeing the log in our own eye.
Be Specific
So we pray for God to reveal our sin to us, and then we search the Scriptures so we can pinpoint exactly where we have departed from His way. It is not enough to just sort of be down on yourself in general. Some people just walk around under a cloud of generalized guilt. They have this feeling, “I’m a bad person,” and they feel like they deserve punishment, but if you ask them, “What specific sin did you commit?” they can’t give you a clear answer. When a person talks about being such a terrible sinner, but he can’t put his finger on any specific sin, it just may be that he is not genuinely concerned about fighting against sin in his life. Because if he were really concerned about sin, he would take the time to figure out what the specific sin is so he could fight against it.
Listen to Counsel
So we look to the Scriptures for the answer, and one of the most important ways God opens our eyes to the truth of His Word is through the counsel of the saints around us. When there is something in your life that all the most godly people you know believe is sin, but you are convinced it is ok, that is a major red flag. If you find yourself keeping certain things secret because the folks at church just would not understand – it is perfectly ok, but people just would not understand no matter how much you explained it to them - maybe the reason people would not understand is because you have fallen for a rationalization that they can see right through because they are not captivated by the sin like you are. So listen to the counsel of godly people.
I am not saying you should just automatically accept whatever they say. If you cannot see it for yourself in the Word of God, then do not accept it. But if all the most spiritual people you know believe this thing is sin (or they would if they knew about it), maybe you need to take another look at the Scriptures and pray for an honest heart.
Conclusion
So now we have learned why we need to pray this prayer, and how to hear God’s answer to the prayer. Now what? What do you do when you ask God to search you and test you, and He does it, and you find out that there is ugliness and vileness inside your heart that you never dreamed could be there? That can be so discouraging and crippling that you just feel like you are going to collapse under the weight of the feelings of guilt and regret. Your heart starts to collapse in on itself with self-condemnation. And the devil joins in and condemns you. And people around you get on the bandwagon and they want to condemn you too. And everything in you just wants to run and hide. What do you do?
Don’t hide from your sin. Bring it right out into the open and confess it to God - without any excuses. And if others are involved, confess it to them as well. Then ask God to forgive you, ask the people you sinned against to forgive you, and trust that the punishment that Jesus suffered on the cross was enough to cover the guilt of your sin. And when all the shouts of condemnation rise up from the devil and your enemies and your own heart, do you know what happens? Those shouts of condemnation slam into the iron wall of Romans 8:1 Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. If the devil tries to remind you of your past, just remind him of his future. He is the one who is condemned, not you. And if your heart keeps trying to pipe up with more self-condemnation...
1 John 3:19 This then is ... how we set our hearts at rest in his presence 20 whenever our hearts condemn us. For God is greater than our hearts
His judgment trumps my judgment, the world’s judgment, and the devil’s judgment, so instead of wallowing in self-condemning guilt and regret, we look up from the disaster of our own, evil way, and there is the hand of our Father, extended to us. And we take it, and follow Him, and He leads us out of the maze of dead end ways of sin into the one, eternal, way of everlasting life with Him. And we find that that sin we thought was the pathway to happiness was in reality a prison of dead ends, and a crushing burden, and our hearts swell with joy now that we have been set free from it.

Benediction: Romans 8:12 Therefore, brothers, we have an obligation--but it is not to the flesh, to live according to it. 13 If you live according to the flesh, you are about to die; but if by the Spirit you put to death the misdeeds of the body, you will live, 14 because those who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God. 

James 1:25 Questions
1)	Can you think of any sins that in your heart just do not seem very sinful? In what ways could that disconnect with reality put you at risk?
2)	Are there some sins that you resist because you know they are wrong, but you do not resist them by preferring something better (so that resisting feels more like loss than like gain)? 
3)	What events in your life might be the answer to the prayer, “Try me, and know my thoughts”? Did those trials expose anything? 

Appendix: Practical Theology 
It is not unusual, in the church, to run into people who are very well read in theology, but who have little or no experience with God Himself. They are big into systematic theology, but not so much into practical theology. They can talk for hours about when the rapture will happen, but they have no idea how to use the truth about the rapture to overcome sin or encourage a brother who is down. They can give you 50 different verses proving the doctrine of the Trinity, but if you say, "Ok, so if God is Father, Son, and Spirit, what are the implications for how I should live?" you get a blank stare. People who are into academics, very often turn information about God into an end in itself, as if knowing information were the final goal. But you never see that in the Bible. I think you would be hard pressed to find any kind of theology other than practical theology in the Bible. You do not see detached doctrines, “This is true, this is true, this is true...” What you see is always, “This is true, therefore do this” or “therefore think or feel this way.” A great example of that is Psalm 139. Psalm 139 teaches us a lot of theology - a lot of wonderful truths about the nature and attributes of God. But it is not just a list of facts. No psalm in the Bible is more theological than this one, and yet no psalm is more practical and personal and devotional than this one. Omniscience and omnipresence are not Bible words. They are seminary words that generally leave us unaffected both in affections and in conscience. There is a place for terms like that in some contexts, but when all our talk about God gets reduced down to words like that, we run the risk of reducing God down to a set of propositions. 
If you are into systematic theology, don’t ever forget that all of God’s Word is meant to be lived. It is all meant to be obeyed. Everything that is said in the Bible is said for a purpose, and we must never be content to just learn the information without the purpose being achieved in our lives.
The opposite error is when people get so caught up with thinking about themselves that they only think about God in relationship to their own needs and desires. God exists to give them what they want, but the primary focus is on self, with God in the background. I think those people are the ones writing most popular Christian music these days. Even when they talk about the cross, the focus is on self, and Jesus is in the background. One example is the song titled, "Something Worth Dying For." 
"Oh, sounds like a song about Christ."
No - it's not about Jesus; it's about ME. 
"Am I really something beautiful? Yeah, I wanna believe, I wanna believe that I'm not just some wandering soul...Yeah, I wanna believe, Jesus, help me believe that I am someone worth dying for"
Why did Jesus die for me? Was it because He is so generous and kind and magnanimous and giving? No, it was because I am so supremely valuable, that Jesus was getting a good deal when He gave His life up to get me. Any time self is in the foreground and God is in the background, that is a twisted, inverted perspective that dishonors God and ultimately destroys you.
So how do we find that balance? We do not want to be like the people who focus mainly on self with God in the background. And we do not want to be like those people who know a million facts about God but they are all detached from day to day living. What is the right way to think about self and God? There is no better place to go to learn how to do that than Psalm 139. It is about as personal as you can get, and it is the mountain peak of theology proper.